Month: September 2016

People who acknowledge one God in their belief and worship one God in their heart are in the communion of saints on earth and the communion of angels in the heavens. Each of these groups or communions is called a partnership, and is a partnership, because there is one God among its people, and they are in the one God.

These same people also have a partnership with the entire angelic heaven. I would even go so far as to say they have a partnership with each and every one in heaven. For they are all like children and descendants of one parent, with such similar minds, mannerisms, and looks that they recognize each other as relatives.

The angelic heaven is laid out in communities on the basis of all the varieties of love for what is good. All these kinds of love aim at one most universal love: love for God. All people who direct the acknowledgment of their faith and the worship of their heart to one God who is the Creator of the universe and also the Redeemer and the Regenerator are descended from that love.

People who do not acknowledge God are cut off from the church because the whole point of the church is God, and because the things related to God that are called theological teachings give the church its structure. Therefore to deny the existence of God is to deny everything having to do with the church. The denial itself is what cuts them off; that is, they cut themselves off. God does not cut them off.

They are damned as well because those who are cut off from the church are also cut off from heaven. The church on earth and the angelic heaven act as a unit, just like the inner and outer self, and like the spiritual part and the physical part in each of us. God created us in such a way that our inner self is in the spiritual world and our outer self is in the physical world.

Therefore to make us permanent and everlasting beings, God made us citizens of both worlds so that the spiritual part of us, which belongs in heaven, could be planted in the physical part belonging to this world the way a seed is planted in the ground.

We can infer the oneness of God from the creation of the universe, because the universe is a work connected together as one thing from beginning to end, all dependent on one God as the body depends on its soul. The universe was designed to allow God to be omnipresent, keep every detail of it under his supervision, and maintain it perpetually as one entity, that is, preserve it.

This is why Jehovah God says he is “the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega” (see Isaiah 44:6; Revelation 1:8, 17); and why he says elsewhere that he makes all things, stretches out the heavens, and extends the earth by himself (see Isaiah 44:24).

This vast system called the universe is a work connected as one thing from beginning to end because God had a single purpose in creating it: an angelic heaven populated by the human race. All the things that make up the world are means of fulfilling that purpose, because someone who intends an end result also intends the means to achieve it.

This truth can be corroborated by countless phenomena in the visible world [around us], for the universe is like a stage on which proofs are constantly being demonstrated that God exists and that there is one God.

By way of illustration I will cite a memorable occurrence that I experienced in the spiritual world: Once when I was having a conversation with angels, there were several people present who had recently arrived from the physical world. When I saw them I wished them a happy arrival and told them a number of things they would not otherwise have known about the spiritual world. After that I asked them what considered opinions about God and nature they were bringing with them from the world.

Their answer was this: “Nature produces everything that occurs in the created universe. After creation, God endowed nature with this productive power and ability; he imprinted this power on it. God’s only role [now] is to maintain nature’s productive power and ability and keep them from failing. Therefore these days everything in the world that comes about and is produced or reproduced is attributed to nature.”

I replied that nature of itself does nothing; it is God who produces things through nature. They asked me to prove it. So I said, “People who believe that the Divine is at work in every detail of nature find support for a belief in God in many of the phenomena they observe in the world. They find much more evidence to support a belief in God than to support a belief in nature.

The first reason for this is that knowledge about God and therefore acknowledgment of God is not possible without revelation; and knowledge of the Lord and therefore acknowledgment that all the fullness of divinity dwells physically in him is not possible without the Word, which is a garland of revelations. From the revelation they have been given, people are able to meet God, receive an inflow, and thus be made spiritual instead of earthly.

Early revelation spread throughout the whole world, and the earthly self distorted it in many different ways, giving rise to divergences, disagreements, heresies, and schisms among religions.

The second reason [for the diversity of opinions on God] is that the earthly self cannot comprehend anything about God; it can comprehend only the world, and conform it to itself. This is why it is among the axioms of the Christian church that the earthly self is against the spiritual self, and that they battle each other. People then have come to acknowledge from the Word [or] from some other revelation that there is a God, and yet in both the past and the present they have had a diversity of opinions on the nature and the oneness of God.

From the divine inflow into human souls, discussed just above, it follows that in everyone there is an inner voice saying that God exists and that there is one God. Nevertheless there are people who deny God, people who worship nature as God, people who worship many gods, and people who worship idols as gods.

The reason for this is that they have let worldly and bodily perspectives block off the inner reaches of their reason or intellect and obliterate their first childhood idea of God; they have rejected religion from their heart and have put it behind them.

There is an inflow from God into us. This is obvious from everyone’s ready admission that everything good that is truly good and that exists in us and is done by us is from God. The same admission applies to everything related to goodwill and faith. For we read, “We cannot receive anything unless it is given to us from heaven” (John 3:27). And Jesus said, “Without me you cannot do anything” (John 15:5), meaning anything having to do with goodwill and faith.

This inflow comes into our souls because the soul is the inmost and highest part of us. The inflow from God reaches that part first and then comes down into the things below and enlivens them, depending on our openness to what flows in. Of course, truths that will become part of our faith do indeed flow in through our hearing and are implanted in our mind, which is below the soul; but all these truths do is prepare us to accept what flows in from God through our soul. The quality of that preparation determines the quality of our acceptance and of the transformation of our earthly faith into spiritual faith.

The whole of Sacred Scripture teaches that God exists, because at the core of Sacred Scripture there is nothing but God, or the divine quality that comes from God. Scripture was dictated by God and nothing else can come from God except what is God and is called divine. This is what lies at the heart of Scripture.

In the derivative layers of Scripture that come from that heart and lie below it, however, Sacred Scripture has been adapted to the comprehension of both angels and people in the world. In these layers too there is divineness, but in different forms that are called heavenly, spiritual, and earthly divine qualities. They are in fact the layered clothes of God.

What God himself is like at the heart of the Word is something that cannot be seen by any created person or thing. When Moses prayed to see the glory of Jehovah, Jehovah replied that no one can see God and live [Exodus 33:20]. The situation at the heart of the Word is similar, where God exists in his own underlying reality and his own essence.

The very essence and soul of everything in a comprehensive theology is the acknowledgment of God [arising] from a concept of him. Therefore it is necessary to begin with the oneness of God, and to prove it point by point:

1. The whole of Sacred Scripture teaches that there is one God, and therefore so do the theologies of the churches in the Christian world.

2. The recognition that God exists and that there is one God flows universally into human souls.

3. As a result, every nation in the whole world that possesses religion and sound reason acknowledges that God exists and that there is one God.

4. For various reasons, different nations and peoples have had and still have a diversity of opinions on the nature of that one God.

5. On the basis of many phenomena in the world, human reason is capable of perceiving and concluding, if it wants to, that God exists and that there is one God.

6. If there were not one God the universe could not have been created or maintained.

7. Those who do not acknowledge God are cut off from the church and damned.

8. Nothing about the church is integrated in people who acknowledge many gods rather than one.

While we call the total assemblage of angels heaven because they do make it up, what really makes heaven overall and in every specific instance is the divine nature that emanates from the Lord, flowing into angels and accepted by them.

The divine nature that emanates from the Lord is the good intrinsic to love and the truth intrinsic to faith. The amount angels accept from the Lord of what is good and what is true determines the extent to which they are angels and are heaven.